Technology trends 2017: These are the most popular tools

Earlier this year we invited you to fill out our annual survey — its aim was to find out which technology topics will be especially important for you in 2017. Today’s the day! It’s time for the big unveiling.

Technology trends 2017

One month, 900+ respondents. Our annual technology trends survey came to an end last month, so now it’s time to find out what topics will be especially important for you in 2017.

DevOps tools: The trends

DevOps is a complex concept; in addition to getting Dev and Ops on the same page, DevOps is about the transformation processes in companies which enable new technology possibilities to mix well with an improved culture of collaboration.

The cloud, for example, makes purchasing hardware for building your own infrastructure obsolete and makes it possible to embrace new architectural approaches like microservices or serverless. Container technologies, on the other hand, make the alignment between dev and ops smoother. Furthermore, new automation tools facilitate the construction of continuous delivery pipelines.

In our survey, we asked readers how interested they are in DevOps this year. It turns out that 31 percent of respondents find DevOps “very interesting” while 36,9 percent consider it “interesting.”

JAXenter technology trends 2017 survey

These results show that DevOps is right where it belongs: among this year’s most popular trends.

Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery

Let’s see what gems we have in this part of the survey. As far as Continuous Integration is concerned, Jenkins is the clear winner with 78.1 percent, followed by Travis CI, TeamCity and Bamboo.

Although it was a clear win for Jenkins, the situation is a bit more complicated for Continuous Delivery tools. The winner — Ansible— was closely followed by Vagrant, Puppet und Chef. “Younger” tools such as Otto (from HashiCorp) and Habitat (from Chef) did not manage to impress a lot of respondents, which might indicate a rather low level of awareness of these tools.

Container

As far as container technologies are concerned, the biggest winner is Docker, which managed to grab the attention and interest of almost 80 percent of the respondents, followed by Kubernetes (53,2 percent) and CoreOS.

If we choose to see the bigger picture, the winners of the most popular tools are Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Ansible and Vagrant.

Last year, Jenkins was respondents’ favorite tool but Docker was the runner-up. Vagrant (now occupying the fifth position) took home the bronze medal while Kubernetes failed to make it to the top 5. A lot changed in one year — take a look!

DevOps tools: Insider tips

These results suggest that DevOps — along with the technologies, methods and tools — is enjoying the attention. Plus, we get to see — and experiment with— a bunch of new tools which promise to make our lives easier.

That being said, let’s take a look at the tool radar, which highlights some of the tools that survey respondents found interesting. Spoiler alert: respondents seem to be very interested in container platform Rancher and repository manager GitLab.

Rancher was mentioned six times, GitLab five times and Salt and CircleCI two times each. The rest of the tools were mentioned just once.

That’s a wrap. These were the most popular tools this year.

JAXenter.com and JAXenter.de readers had about a month to weigh in on how this year’s technology trends should look like. The survey was organized into ten sections:

Languages

UI Technologies

Web Frameworks

Microservices / Dev Frameworks

Cloud Platforms / Technologies

Continuous Delivery & Automatization

DevOps, Container & Service Discovery

Data Storage & Processing

Software Architecture

More & mixed things

More than 900 people have filled out to the survey — we’d like to thank you all for your interest and for allowing us to paint a very representative picture of the technology trends the Java community is interested in this year.

Hartmut Schlosser is an editor for JAXenter and a specialist in Java Enterprise-Technologies, Eclipse & ALM, Android and Business Technology. Before working at S&S Media he studied Computer Science, Music, Anthropology and French Philology.